books. poetry. paganism. feminism. queerness. blog.

Neil Gaiman wrote this on his blog a few weeks ago, in response to an email from an aspiring author:

It does help, to be a writer, to have the sort of crazed ego that doesn’t allow for failure. The best reaction to a rejection slip is a sort of wild-eyed madness, an evil grin, and sitting yourself in front of the keyboard muttering “Okay, you bastards. Try rejecting this!” and then writing something so unbelievably brilliant that all other writers will disembowel themselves with their pens upon reading it, because there’s nothing left to write. Because the rejection slips will arrive. And, if the books are published, then you can pretty much guarantee that bad reviews will be as well. And you’ll need to learn how to shrug and keep going. Or you stop, and get a real job.

Which is the attitude I’ve adopted towards my school work, since I’m crashing and burning in a few of my classes and have fucked up several papers. I know I’m better than this slacker chick I’ve turned into; it’s just funny how a major emotional/mental identity crisis tends to distract you from the important things in life, like the details of the French Revolution. How long are personal crises supposed to last anyway? Aren’t I due some vacation time at this point? Anyway, when I sit down at the computer tomorrow to write 10 pages in French on historical representations of Charlotte Corday, it’ll be with a “Ha! Just you try and flunk this you bastards!” kind of approach.

I had this big fancy entry written in my notebook, 2 pages front and back, with quotes from the introduction and analysis of Ms. Johnson’s assessment of Henry Tilney’s attitude on authority and epistemology and, honestly, it’s a pretty darn good entry but it’s not what I want to say any more. Or at least I don’t want to say it that way; it sounds like a paper for class. Really I could (begrudgingly) quote E. M. Forster (boo! hiss!)

Jane Austen is my favorite author!…Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.

and leave it at that. But criticism, for me, only makes me admire her more. I’m always irked when people treat Austen like a glorified romance novelist; she’s using that old boy-meets-girl plot to say so much more. And her prose is so skillful, her wit so sharp and observant. Henry Tilney is her best hero. I like Darcy but he’s highly overrated; he and Wentworth act like jerks (disclaimer: I like Wentworth as well. That heart-stopping love letter of his redeems him). Mr. Knightley is a bit imperious. Colonel Brandon and Edward Ferrars are barely there. And I don’t think anybody likes Edmund. Henry is not only a delightful person himself, but I love the way Austen uses him. She makes us laugh not just at Henry but at the ideas he’s mocking–that women are ignorant and stupid and silly, etc. According to Claudia L. Johnson’s introduction to my so-gorgeous-I’d-run-into-a-burning-building-to-save-it Everyman’s Library edition (and let me take this opportunity to say how much I fucking hate Amazon’s new search engine. Bah humbug)–Johnson claims that NA is really all about reading, a defense not just of novels but of a female literary tradition, of women’s reading and women’s writing, and I agree. Sure, Catharine’s taste for gothic novels exacerbates her naivete and gullibility, but the joke is that in the end, she’s right. General Tilney is a villain, and Henry’s speech about “the country and age in which we live” seems ultimately a bit naive itself. Austen’s novel is proof that excellence really is pretty fairly divided between the sexes. I hate it when people fall into the Austen-as-kindly-maiden-aunt routine, call her “Dear Jane” or “Our Lady” (ick), it reminds me of Henry James’ condescending praise of her; I don’t want her artistic integrity and genius forgotten, the real importance of her work overshadowed by swooning fangirls and “Victorian” fetishists. She’s still so readily dismissed, as a witty spinster who just happened to write a few good romances. A guy in my lit class last semester complained that Persuasion was boring and pointless–after all, it wasn’t about anything important. I think Austen is revolutionary in the fact that she’s become a great artist by writing about “unimportant” things.

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Apropos of nothing, take a look at this website, created by a Ukrainian woman who likes to ride her motorbike through the Chernobyl site. I was only 4 when it happened, so I don’t know much about it; but we had old issues of National Geographic in our basement and as a kid I remember looking at their pictures of the accident. I still remember them; I should dig up that old issue next time I go home. I mention the website here because Elena (the webmaster) is strikingly eloquent in her imperfect english:

they call it a town where time stands still. May be it is because clocks in a ghosttown don’t show real time, they are set for showing a radiation level.

I wonder how this guy feel, who once went for a fishing trip and who was not able to return home. It is like you life is cut on two pieces. in one is you slippers still under you bed, photos of a first love that left on piano.. in other is you yourself, you memories and a fishing rod.

Usually, beeping of dosimeter speed me up and I pass this part of road as fast as road condition allow. The place in front of me called red or magic wood. In 1986 this wood has been red with radiation and then they cut it off and left there and bury under 1 meter of earth. As you can see, on asphalt things not bad, but if I step 10 meters forward, my dosimeter will run out of scale, if I walk few hundred meters towards reactor, then I will find 3 roengen. If I keep walking all the way to reactor, then at the end of a journey I will glow in a dark. May be this is why they call it a magic wood. this sort of a magic when one walk in in a biker leather and coming out like a knight in a shinning armour.

The pictures are even better. You get a feel for the eerieness of the place; people just up and left and you can see what remains of their ordinary lives; and there are a few who stayed, who came back and live in Chernobyl alongside the wolves and bears and wild horses.

Fairly accurate, although it could do with some better results. What about Sam-I-Am? Or Thing One and Thing Two? Or Fox in Socks, Bartholomew Cubbins and the Oobleck, Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose or Gertrude McFuzz? And I’ll take this opportunity to endorse a constitutional amendment banning all Hollywood live-action versions of Dr. Suess books. L.A. must be a strange and wicked place for them to rip off and exploit Dr. Suess.

And now for something completely different:

Postatem obscuri lateris nescitis.

“You do not know the power of the DarkSide.” There are two possibilities: youare a Star Wars geek, or you are unreasoninglyscary.

Holy Shit. I’m Ginsberg, huh, not Dickinson or Plath? Or even my beloved Walt Whitman? I tried to read “Howl” once when I was 15 (I was very into the Beats. Wore a lot of black), got as far as the part where he tells America to “go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” I really am going to have to read him one of these days.

It was love at first sight, and finally I was able, through inter-library loan ([insert deity of choice] bless whoever thought that up), to track down some of her work. Beginning with O was Broumas’ first published book of poetry, and she didn’t disappoint.

I’ve been sitting here thinking, or trying to anyway, about what to say and write about Olga Broumas. I could write reams of essays and theses about her work, it’s so rich and steeped in ideas and themes that interest me. My life is so wrapped up in my identity as a student that I have a hard time being anything else. I’m the only person I know who reads poetry for pleasure, in her spare time. I always have, ever since I was a kid clutching my copy of Shel Silverstein. I don’t mention it much though; it feels pretentious and snobby, to say you read poetry voluntarily. I keep thinking of Captain Benwick in Persuasion. I read poetry mainly for the pleasure of language, the way words sound, how they fit together, the images and rhythm they create, for the feeling Emily Dickinson describes, as if your head has lifted off your shoulders. I tend to like more traditional forms–I love sonnets–I have difficulty with free verse. But Broumas’ work is so wonderful and challenging, sensuous and vivid, I’m starting to warm up to the space and difficulty that free verse offers. Since Broumas is lesbian poet from Greece, the presence of Sappho is (of course) everywhere in her writing. I love these lines from “Caritas,” a poem that seems to describe lesbian desire as a kind of mysticism:

Her handsome hands. Each

one a duchess in her splendid gardens

Isn’t that wonderful? It’s just the most lovely image I’ve ever read. And this too:

Here the remnants of

an indefatigable anger, the jubilant

birth yell, here the indelible

covens of pleasure, a web

of murmurs, a lace

mantilla of sighs.

I wish I was up on my Greek mythology, since the first part of Beginning With O, “Twelve Aspects of God,” is all about Greek female deities. She never refers to them as “goddesses” though, always using the “male” term, which is interesting–she makes “god” a woman (again, some would say). Exploring the spirit of ancient goddesses in the modern world, how they manifest themselves in women. Spirituality, sex, desire, anger are all woven in her meandering, elliptical free verse. Her metaphors twist and turn, her imagery unexpected and sharp. In “Circe,” I love how Broumas turns what’s usually regarded as a negative experience into an expression of power.

By the time

I get to the corner

bar, corner store, corner construction

site, I become divine. I turn

men into swine. Leave

them behind me whistling, grunting, wild.

In “Maenad” she takes a clever twist on an old adage.

Hell has no rage like this

women’s rage.

IIRC the Maenads were female worshippers of Dionysus who would tear men to pieces. Broumas’ poem is about the fury of women scorned at every turn, by sons who use them, daughters who reject them, mothers who control them, and by other women as well. In “Artemis” and “Demeter” she addresses female language, a feminine literary tradition:

…a curviform alphabet

that defies

decoding, appears

to consist of vowels, beginning with O…

What tiny fragments

survive, mangled into our language.

I am a woman committed to

a politics

of transliteration (“Artemis”)

In “Demeter” she names a literary lineage of women writers:

Anne. Sylvia. Virginia.

Adrienne the last, magnificent last.

Modern Demeters/Persephones maybe?

Broumas ends Beginning With O with poems based on fairy tales. I loved what she did with “Cinderella”:

Apart from my sisters, estranged

from my mother, I am a woman alone

in a house of men

who secretly

call themselves princes, alone

with me usually, under cover of dark. I am the one allowed in

to the royal chambers, whose small foot convienently

fills the slipper of glass. The woman writer, the lady

umpire, the madam chairman, anyone’s wife.

I know what I know.

Cinderella as the Token Woman! How cool is that? Her “success” only reinforces oppressive structures and isolates her.

The princes spoke

in their fathers’ language, were eager to praise me

my nimble tongue. I am a woman in a state of siege, alone

In “Sleeping Beauty”, she is awakened by a kiss from Princess Charming:

…your red

lips suspect, unspeakable

liberties as

we cross the street, kissing

against the light, singing, This

is the woman I woke

from sleep, the woman that woke

me sleeping.

“Little Red Riding Hood” is my favorite poem in the book. She manages to put a fresh perspective on the sexual overtones of the story, and focuses on the relationship between mother, daughter, and grandmother. I love the last image the poem ends on:

I’m going home for “Spring” Break tomorrow. I plan on spending it sitting around, resenting my parents and reading Northanger Abbey. I’m also hoping to finish Olga Broumas (with whom I am truly, madly, deeply in love) and the collection of lesbian fiction. More scintillating and thrilling reviews when I return!